I've been making it at home using greek yogurt as a culture, but i have some texture issues and was looking for help. If anyone here has made it successfully i can post my method to see if i'm doing something wrong.

The issue i'm having basically is that the cheese texture, instead of being nice and creamy/gummy like the inside of a brie/camembert it's more like a dense cream cheese.

As i said, the flavor is good, a little salty (will adjust brine time next time), but the texture is wrong. Traditionally stracchino is very soft and moist, like a really soft brie, so it has that melty texture even at fridge temps, but it tastes like a tangy fresh milk b/c it's a fresh cheese. My cheese is not gooey at all. Its like a dry cream cheese..

My first impression is that it over acidified due to the length of time you had to wait for a clean break. Rennet tablets, according to many folks here, are unreliable if one doesn't know how old they might be, or how well kept. I have only ever used double strength liquid rennet, and have not had issues with it. I'll see about researching stracchino a bit more, as I have not made it. Have you used those rennet tabs in other cheeses with success? The other thing is, if those tabs are fine, the milk could be the issue. Many folks avoid HTST pasteurized milk, as well as homogenized. Those 2 processes really can degrade the quality of milk for cheese making, and often result in weak curd formation. Edit: My phone changed HTST to GRAY, I have made the correction above.

As an addendum, our whole milk may still not have enough fat, as it may often come from dairies that aren't pasturing their animals. As most of our dairy land is also pretty flat, it might be difficult to find the quality of milk that stracchino calls for. Your best bet for milk would likely be raw whole milk, but you may find adding a little cream to the milk may help.

If you're only heating to 90F you need to use a meso. culture. Yoghurt is a thermo. culture and only really works best at temperatures above 92F. The recipe I have heats the milk to 96.8F/36C before adding the culture.

Also, your rennet is very high for 1 gallon of milk: 1 tab. will coagulate c. 50Ltrs milk, so even a quarter will be more than you need - more like 1/8 - 1/6th is needed. I don't use tab. rennet, but fresh liquid, and for this amount of milk would probably use less than half a tsp.

If you're only heating to 90F you need to use a meso. culture. Yoghurt is a thermo. culture and only really works at temperatures above 92F. The recipe I have heats the milk to 96.8F/36C before adding the culture. Also, your rennet is high for 1 gallon of milk.

Understood. The cheese i'm told uses a thermo culture, so maybe i didn't activate the culture by keeping the temp so low. Thanks.

I should have used about 1/2 that amount of rennet, but i wanted to make sure i got a set given past issues with Junket rennet. I can deal with some bitterness from excess rennet if that is the only issue. I want to get the texture right.

There is a false notion going on all over the forum that I'd like to clear up. People seem to think that thermophilic cultures are totally inactive at lower than the recommended temperatures. That is wholly untrue. They are active at mesophilic temperatures. Quite so. Do they thrive? Again, quite so. But, they do have an optimal temperature range in which they perform their best, above that of mesophilic cultures.